


Everything You Didn't Know About Sleepers. And What Happened To Ivanova's Mom? (Part 2)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [99]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Attempted Murder, Backstory, Bester Was Right, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon Compliant, Childhood Trauma, Crawford-Tokash Act, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How Normals Get Away With Assault, How canon misled you, Ivanova is a dick, Ivanova is a murderous bigot, Law, Origin of sleepers, Parental Death, Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, Sleepers, Suicide, Telepath Law (Babylon 5), Violence, Worldbuilding, double standards, internalized oppression, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 11:50:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14056377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Literally the whole background on sleepers.And why no, the Corps did NOT kill her mom.Part 1 ishere.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	Everything You Didn't Know About Sleepers. And What Happened To Ivanova's Mom? (Part 2)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

As I said in [Part 1](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14055426), the purpose of the following essay is to place all the relevant information in the same place, so 1) my readers can see where I'm getting everything (and why), and 2) readers who would like a link that explains all this have such a go-to link.

With some basic facts out of the way, it is now time to look at what happened to Ivanova's mother in a broader context.

As I said on Tumblr:

 **What the show didn’t tell you** : To blame the Corps for sleepers and their effects, as Ivanova does, is canonically **_so out of touch with reality_** that since the beginning, even rogue telepath Underground leaders, **_the most extreme of the extreme_** , do not blame the Corps for this - and correctly only blame normals.

To back up:

Starting in the early 22nd century, Earth began to create a [caste system](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10292036): people, and telepaths. By the mid-22nd century, these policies had become universal across all Earth-controlled territory (on Earth or off-world). And these laws had not been changed at all by the time of the show, a hundred and fifty years after this began.

Who made these laws? Normals. All normals.

I covered much of the relevant early in the project in [Josephine's Story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10293074/chapters/22772363). It is well-documented in canon (quoted and cited in that story) how this system of legally segregating, disenfranchising and dehumanizing telepaths began.

  * All the laws were made by normals, and any chance that telepaths could rise up and challenge them was squashed by laws, regulations and eventually a charter barring telepaths from holding office, from becoming lawyers, or from exercising free political speech (among many other restrictions).
  * The laws requiring telepaths to register and join the Corps (and before that, the MRA), take sleeper drugs or go to prison were first introduced by Sen. Crawford and his associates [as far back as 2117](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10324169/chapters/22823876).



          "But what about those who don't want to join?" DiPeso asked.

          "Well, naturally there will be some who want to continue with their normal lives. I'm happy to announce that Halotech has developed a new drug that shows great promise in inhibiting psionic abilities. It's still in the testing stage, but it looks good and, once approved, will be offered as an option for telepaths who want to preserve a normal lifestyle."

  * The Psi Corps charter of 2156 created a "universal MRA" - converted the MRA into an independently chartered regulatory agency, and effectively mandated that as a condition of telepaths being spared genocide and extermination, they would be forced to enforce these laws on each other, [by force if necessary](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10292036).



          Final Reckoning, p. 243:

          Bester, at his trial: "This undeclared, unrecognized war has been fought for a hundred and fifty-seven years. Its casualties - have always been on _my_ side. And when this killing began, what did EarthGov do about it? They built a telepath ghetto called Teeptown, and they gave us badges to mark us, separate us. They gave any normal who wanted to kill a telepath the means to find us and identify us. Then they used telepaths to control telepaths. Why? The implicit threat was always there - ask any telepath old enough to remember. _Either you control yourselves, or we will control you._

          "That was the choice I grew up with. Hunt down and sometimes kill my own kind, with the blessings of EarthGov and every normal citizen who voted for it, or be subjected to the same uncontrolled genocide that was visited on us in the beginning."

  * The drug Halotech invented was highly toxic.



         See Dark Genesis, p. 58-59. A low-level telepath named Mercy decides to take early-version sleeper drugs in order to keep her job as a secretary, but the drugs make her very ill. (“Mercy came back the next day [after the injection] like a dead woman. When Blood tried to touch her mind, she had to run for the toilet, and there she vomited for half an hour. Mercy curled on the couch, her normally lively eyes blank. She watched the vid with only sluggish interest. Tentatively, Blood scanned her again. She was reminded of Novocain, and also of heroin. It was as if Mercy only remembered being alive. She locked Mercy in her room the next day, called her boss, and told him that the injection had made her sick.”)

         Mercy is very low-level - in later generations, someone of her strength never would have been in the Corps or been offered sleeper drugs, but this is very early, and everyone who tested positively was treated the same way back then.

  * More than seventy years later, by around 2188, sleeper drugs were still manufactured by normals, and were still highly toxic.



         See Dark Genesis, p. 229: Circa 2188, a pharmaceutical company owned by Holden Walters, and apparently based in Seattle but with several facilities elsewhere, is producing sleepers “by the ton.” The Dexters (Bester's biological parents) and their associates bomb one of the plants, with the intention of [poisoning the city of Seattle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10835274) with the drugs released in the explosion.

         On p. 229, Fiona Dexter (Bester's biological mom) refers to telepaths on sleepers as “zombies.” (“No one who had met one of the zombies the antitelepathy drug eventually produced could really imagine it was a legitimate option. Yet it was manufactured by the ton, wasn’t it? Normals watched their neighbors take the injection twice a week, without blinking.”)

         Pretty much the only thing that both rogue telepath criminals and the the Corps agree on is that _sleeper drugs are fucking horrible_ \- they're designed by normals and manufactured by normals to poison, to abuse, and to control.

         The Corps never uses such drugs even on the most dangerous telepath criminals: to subdue them, to transport them, during incarceration - _never_. These drugs are only ever used in canon _by normals_ to incapacitate, disable, abuse, control and even kill telepaths (such as Ivanova's mother).

  * Over time, the formula of the drugs was tinkered with so that telepaths could live on the drugs longer, and thus make the normal-owned and operated drug companies more profit. A single dose no longer made someone violently ill (such as happened to Mercy), and some people even could live on the drugs for many years with no "side effects" (which may or may not actually be intentional).
  * As of 2256, one of the major producers of sleeper drugs for EarthGov was William Edgars.



         Deadly Relations, p. 196-197: “A little more interesting was a profile of William Edgars, an up-and-coming billionaire in the pharmaceutical industry. Edgars was one of the contractors who produced sleepers, so anything concerning him was of interest. The article was typical Fortune 500 stuff, though - hobbies, carefully chosen political views, photos with the dog. When asked about business teeps, he seemed to avoid the question, an interesting thing in and of itself.”

         Edgars’ hatred and fear of telepaths, and his plot to kill and/or enslave all telepaths (as many as TEN MILLION PEOPLE) through a (Shadowtech) engineered virus, is detailed in _Exercise of Vital Powers_ and _Face of the Enemy._

         His extermination plot is foiled not because the mundane police on Mars did do or could do anything to stop it (if they even cared), but because Bester, and his team of crack commando bloodhounds, personally stopped it.

**To blame the Corps for sleeper drugs, and the effects of them, is legally, historically, factually and morally wrong.**

Yet Ivanova blames the Corps for it anyway (and all telepaths in the Corps by proxy, as I will discuss more later), because the show doesn't want you to know the facts above (all canon!). They omit these facts entirely. No telepath ever presents the truth to Ivanova when she goes on like this - not Talia (as I aimed to correct in my "honest rewrite" of  _Legacies_ [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10219790)), and not Bester in later episodes. We only get this:

         "You know," he says in  _Ship of Tears_ , "when I first came to Babylon 5, I studied your record. Terrible pity about your mother. But she took her own life. It wasn't the Corps that did it."

He never says why, of course, and this crucial piece is intentionally cropped out as to give viewers the false impression that he's lying, and it really was the Corps all along, that he's deflecting the Corps' culpability by blaming the victim, or at least that there is something "reasonable" and "justified" in Ivanova's hatred of the Corps and all telepaths in the Corps by proxy.

A hatred so vicious she [attempts to kill a telepath on Io](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10507632), [threatens Harriman Gray's life](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10587027) (and then leaves the room at the end, with the other mundane command staff, while he's lying unconscious on the floor, having been assaulted by Ben Zion). A hatred that runs so deep she finds ways indirectly to blame Talia for her mother's death, even though Talia had nothing to do with it, and projects "victimhood" onto Talia because she was raised in the Corps ("What happened back then is not your fault. But it's part of what you are. And yet you're as much of a victim as my mother." _Midnight on the Firing Line_ )

A hatred that runs so deep, she tries to fire up the defense grid and **shoot Bester's ship out of the sky** ( _Dust to Dust_ ) - not because of anything he's ever done to her (he hasn't! even if they blame him personally for everything) - he's actually going to the station to save everyone's asses,  _again_ , this time from a drug dealer whose activities, if not stopped, endanger thousands if not millions of human and alien lives - but because she fears he's some kind of threat to them all ("what if he scans us and finds out what we've been up to???"), and because she hates "what he represents" (to her). Behind his back, in the same episode, she joyfully talks about her wish to kill him. And though Sheridan overrides the actual order to murder him, no one ever disagrees with Ivanova here or elsewhere about how "right" or "justified" this homicidal hatred and bigotry is. Nor does she face any consequences for said attempted murder(s).

Over Ivanova's wishes (and intentions), they don't outright murder Bester, but guess what they do instead?

_Force him to take sleeper drugs!_

And then they threaten Bester's life again in a similar way when he comes back to the station in _Ship of Tears:_

         Bester, still in his ship, far from the station: "If I came unannounced, your people would shoot me down before I got within two kilometers of Babylon 5 [like you tried to do last time!]."

         "Mr. Bester, we no longer have any ties to Earth or to the Psi Corps. So we don't have to put up with you or your games. Now, I am sitting on four brand-new unidirectional pulse cannons. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't blow you out of the sky."

Aren't mundanes sweet?

Now, if all the proffered reasons for Ivanova's hatred are problematic at best, why does she feel this way? It's not "normal" and "natural" to be so bigoted (against telepaths or anyone else) - people have to be taught that level of hate.

And it can't just be because she lost her mom - do you think she ever says even a single bad word against the Minbari, who actually did kill her brother, as part of the three-year war of extermination they waged against all of humanity - _a decree made by Delenn herself?_ If she wants to punish anyone for deaths in her immediate family, she should try to kill Delenn, who literally gave the order that all humans everywhere, no matter where they live, should be murdered in revenge for the Omega Incident. Delenn personally has the blood of many, many thousands of humans on her hands (tens of thousands in the Battle of the Line alone) - including Ivanova's brother.

Nah. Just telepaths. Because telepaths. She can't harbor any ill-will toward the Minbari - that was all a _misunderstanding_ , you see! (Even though they were actually the single greatest threat to all of humanity until the Shadows woke up. And telepaths were a threat to... literally no one. And never mind that Bester's actually coming to the station to save everyone's lives - or even, in _Ship of Tears_ , risking his own life in coming back there to try to _save the galaxy from the Shadows_.)

In the words of Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men: "You can't handle the truth! You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that [my actions] saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, _saves lives_."

Telepath lives, normal lives, alien lives.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall.

You need me on that wall.

You _put_ me on that wall.

I offer some possible (in-universe) explanations for Ivanova's hatred in the next installment (other than author bias, oh the author bias), along with some possible reasons why her mother felt she had to take the sleeper drugs in order to stay with her family.

I do know that Ivanova's memory is selective:

         "Well, she'd been on the sleepers for so many years. Psi Corps control freaks wouldn't leave her alone. It's the same refrain over and over again. 'Sleepers or prison. Sleepers or prison.'"

No, they were trying to get her to join the Corps. Because unlike the mundane scum who make the drugs, and who make a hefty profit out of poisoning and abusing telepaths, _they didn't want to see her poisoned, disabled, and eventually dead._

Somehow, this remains lost on her, facts be damned.


End file.
